From the day when Pierre, after leaving the Rostovs' with
Natasha's grateful look fresh in his mind, had gazed at the comet that
seemed to be fixed in the sky and felt that something new was
appearing on his own horizon- from that day the problem of the
vanity and uselessness of all earthly things, that had incessantly
tormented him, no longer presented itself. That terrible question
"Why?" "Wherefore?" which had come to him amid every occupation, was
now replaced, not by another question or by a reply to the former
question, but by her image. When he listened to, or himself took
part in, trivial conversations, when he read or heard of human
baseness or folly, he was not horrified as formerly, and did not ask
himself why men struggled so about these things when all is so
transient and incomprehensible- but he remembered her as he had last
seen her, and all his doubts vanished- not because she had answered
the questions that had haunted him, but because his conception of
her transferred him instantly to another, a brighter, realm of
spiritual activity in which no one could be justified or guilty- a
realm of beauty and love which it was worth living for. Whatever
worldly baseness presented itself to him, he said to himself:

"Well, supposing N. N. swindled the country and the Tsar, and the
country and the Tsar confer honors upon him, what does that matter?
She smiled at me yesterday and asked me to come again, and I love her,
and no one will ever know it." And his soul felt calm and peaceful.

Pierre still went into society, drank as much and led the same
idle and dissipated life, because besides the hours he spent at the
Rostovs' there were other hours he had to spend somehow, and the
habits and acquaintances he had made in Moscow formed a current that
bore him along irresistibly. But latterly, when more and more
disquieting reports came from the seat of war and Natasha's health
began to improve and she no longer aroused in him the former feeling
of careful pity, an ever-increasing restlessness, which he could not
explain, took possession of him. He felt that the condition he was
in could not continue long, that a catastrophe was coming which
would change his whole life, and he impatiently sought everywhere
for signs of that approaching catastrophe. One of his brother Masons
had revealed to Pierre the following prophecy concerning Napoleon,
drawn from the Revelation of St. John.

In chapter 13, verse 18, of the Apocalypse, it is said:

Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number
of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six
hundred threescore and six.

And in the fifth verse of the same chapter:

And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and
blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two
months.

The French alphabet, written out with the same numerical values as
the Hebrew, in which the first nine letters denote units and the
others tens, will have the following significance: